NINJA WARS

This is all especially surprising, given that it represents a huge departure from the original Risen, which was a more traditional fantasy game released in the wake of The Elder Scrolls IV. To make matters even better, Risen 2 keeps some other Elder Scrolls elements that work well—such as the accumulation of numerous quests at once, the quick-traveling, the ability to shape the world with your decisions, and the inventory and bartering system. In terms of basic mechanics, the main difference is the third-person view—or so it seems at first.



 Then you get into your first fight, and right then you realize that for all the unique storytelling and Elder Scrolls familiarity of Risen 2, you will be dealing with far too much frustration for this game to be worth it. At the story's outset, all you can do is strike and parry with your sword, which makes you painfully inadequate to the tasks at hand—there isn't any way to block animal attacks, for example. There's no dodge button, and all the animations take far too long to unfold, including the stun animations. You can pretty much either mash buttons and reload if you die, or find a cheap way to kill your enemies—such as exploiting the shoddy A.I. or letting your NPC companions do most of the work. Even winning is far more annoying than it should be; health doesn't regenerate on its own, so you're stuck gobbling down your consumable items or finding a bed to rest in between fights.

 Oh, and some consumables don't even work immediately. Instead, they slowly recharge your health, leaving you vulnerable if another beast attacks right away. If you intentionally designed a combat system for the purpose of increasing players' blood pressure, I'm not sure you could do any better than this.

 In fairness, the combat does get better—very, very slowly. You'll find firearms, which are a lot easier to use than your sword. You can also pay people to train you in sword skills, which is incredibly expensive but also incredibly helpful. You can buy protective gear to shield you from attacks. And last but not least, by accumulating "glory"—Risen 2's EXP—you can level up your various skills to become more lethal. Eventually, after spending hours unlocking features that shouldn't have been locked to begin with—I kid you not, you need to unlock the ability to kick—combat starts to feel like a routine chore.



 That's progress, I suppose, but it's not the kind of progress that makes an RPG compelling and addictive. Instead of trying to improve your character in fun and interesting ways—making him more effective in the game's branching conversations, for example—you're primarily focused on giving him the most basic capabilities, such as the combat skill to defeat a tiny animal without losing half his health first.

 The combat is bad enough to drag Risen 2 to the bottom of the sea all by itself. But numerous other flaws weigh the ship down as well. Despite the game's huge environments and emphasis on freedom, it does relatively little to help you get around. There is a quick-travel feature, which is nice, but there's no mini-map or artificial path pointing you to your next destination, and the quest markers on your large map aren't always useful. What's more, you'll need to acquire your own large map for each new area you encounter, Zelda-style. While you can sometimes enjoy getting lost in Risen 2's gigantic world, sometimes you just want to get where you're going. And the game should do far, far more to facilitate that.